Our Mission

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Who are We

Descriptive words from the team.

Maybe also add each member's profile picture, which link to their personal website.

People

Faculty

Steven S. Skiena
is a Distinguished Teaching Professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University. His research interests include the design of graph, string, and geometric algorithms, and their applications to natural language processing and biology. He is the author of four books, including "The Algorithm Design Manual" and "Calculated Bets: Computers, Gambling, and Mathematical Modeling to Win".

He is co-founder and Chief Scientist at General Sentiment, a media measurement company based on his Lydia text/sentiment analysis system.

Skiena received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois in 1988, and the author of over 130 technical papers. He is a former Fulbright scholar, and recipient of the ONR Young Investigator Award and the IEEE Computer Science and Engineer Teaching Award.

Charles B. Ward currently works as an engineer on the search team at Google. Prior to that, he was a Research Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University.

Charles received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Alabama in 2008, at the age of 23, before continuing his postdoctoral studies at Stony Brook University. During his four years at Stony Brook, Charles worked as a lead developer with the Lydia news analysis project. He also spent a substantial amount of his time collaborating with microbiologists at Stony Brook, using computational methods to design genetic sequences of viral vaccine candidates.

He is the author of over a dozen scholarly papers, covering a diverse array of fields, including research in text analysis, computational social science, computational biology, and graph theory.

In his spare time, Charles is a concert-level solo pianist.He is also an authority on historical strategy games, and spends perhaps too much time playing and designing them.

Ph.D. Students

Rami Al-Rfou is a Ph.D. candidate in the Data Science lab at Stony Brook University.
His current research focus is on multilingual NLP tasks and language modeling. In particular, he is looking at learning features for different languages in an unsupervised way. His goal is to model language without human knowledge or feature engineering. This will enable us to adapt the structures we already learned to solve tasks and challenges for a diverse set of new and resource-scarce languages.

Bryan Perozziis a Ph.D. candidate in the Data Science Lab at Stony Brook University. His current research interests include Data Mining (particularly large-scale Graph Mining), and Machine Learning for multilingual NLP.

In his work so far at Stony Brook, he has worked on distributed graph clustering and the evaluation of unsupervised feature learning approaches for NLP.

Before attending Stony Brook University, Bryan spent several years working in industry as an applied researcher. Bryan holds a MS in Computer Science from the Johns Hopkins University, and a BS in Computer Engineering from Virginia Tech.

Vivek Kulkarni is a Ph.D. candidate in the Data Science Lab at Stony Brook University.

His research interests include complex networks, text mining and analytics and machine learning. At Stony Brook , he has worked on graph mining and multilingual NLP.

Before embarking on graduate school, Vivek worked as a software engineer with Microsoft and Juniper Networks. He also has had the pleasure of interning at Microsoft India, and Google, Mountain View over summers.

Mohammad Amin is a Ph.D. student in the Data Science Lab at Stony Brook University.

Yingtao Tian is a Ph.D. student in the Data Science Lab at Stony Brook University.

Haochen Chen is a Ph.D. student in the Data Science Lab at Stony Brook University.